Excite Truck
(November 2006, Wii, Nintendo/Monster Games)
An offroad racing game that's about more than being first to the finish line. Perform stunts like catching air, drifting, dodging trees, and hitting other cars for points. Make the most of the game's large, open levels to maximize your score.
A high-scoring playthrough of the "Canada: Winding Road" level from Excite Truck.
My primary role on Excite Truck was to design and tune the AI. In addition to making sure that computer-controlled trucks could drive around the track successfully, I needed to come up with a strategy that would be forgiving to novice players (an important target audience for Wii) while putting enough pressure on expert players to ensure a good, hard race (as opposed to gaming the race by hanging back and racking up stunt points).
In collaboration with the AI programmer, I worked out a system that was a little smarter than typical "rubber-banding" logic. Rather than simply trying to stick close to the player, AI cars drive with varying degrees of aggressiveness according to the desired difficulty of a specific level. A given car's level of aggression will change over time, which gives rise to dramatic passes and collisions over the course of the race, and keeps the AI from becoming too predictable. The overall effect is the impression that AI cars are really racing with the player, whether he or she is a beginner or an expert.
Other responsibilities I had on Excite Truck: designing the Crush Challenge mode; tuning the Gate Challenge mode; designing and writing tutorials; designing sound effects; managing the game's overall audio mix.